back to browsing

Brazil [Blu-ray Boxset] [Criterion Collection]

2 discs
Region 1 USA/CA (info)

BRAZIL is Terry Gilliam's masterpiece. Cowritten by Gilliam, playwright Tom Stoppard, and Charles McKeown, the cult-favorite film is set in a futuristic society laden with red tape and bureaucracy. When a bug (literally) gets in the system, an innocent man is killed, leading mild-mannered Sam Lowry (an excellent Jonathan Pryce) to reexamine what he wants out of life. He decides to fight the totalitarian system in his search for freedom--and the woman he loves. The terrific, offbeat cast features Robert De Niro as a renegade heating engineer; Katherine Helmond as Sam's ever-younger mother; Michael Palin as a government-sanctioned torturer with a distaste for upsetting the status quo; Bob Hoskins as a vengeful Central Services employee; Jim Broadbent as a wacko plastic surgeon; the wonderful Ian Holm as Sam's nerve-ridden, pitiful boss, afraid of his own signature; and Kim Greist as the rebel Sam falls for.

The look of BRAZIL is relentless, overwhelming, and outrageously spectacular. Giant monoliths rise from the street; government offices are a network of computers, pneumatic tubes, and narrow hallways built with Nazi-like precision; and apartment complexes are a maze of washed-out grays and numbers, all frighteningly uniform. The terrorist explosions actually bring color into this dull, monochramatic world. BRAZIL is a nightmare vision of the future, yet also hysterically funny and incisive, one of the most inventive, influential, and important films of the 1980s.
Read More...
Credits

Jonathan Pryce, Robert De Niro, Robert DeNiro, Michael Palin, Kim Greist, Kimberly Greist, Ian Holm, Ian Holm Cuthbert, Katherine Helmond, Bob Hoskins, Peter Vaughan, Ian Richardson, Jim Broadbent, James Broadbent, Barbara Hicks, Charles McKeown
Critic Reviews

"...BRAZIL, a jaunty, wittily observed vision of an extremely bleak future, is a superb example of the power of comedy to underscore serious ideas, even solemn ones....Ambitious visual style..."
New York Times
"...It's rich in irony, steeped in surrealism and touched with genius....Easily one of the greatest movies of the '80s..."
Total Film
"...Gilliam creates this dehumanizing universe with demented wit, sane anger and the most eye-popping visuals since METROPOLIS..."
Rolling Stone
"...Landmark retro-future tragicomedy..." -- Rating: A+
Entertainment Weekly
"...It's a knockout..."
Los Angeles Times
"...Hugely inventive..."
Sight and Sound
"Gilliam's belief in the evil of banality is on full display here, made all the more dazzling by Norman Garwood and Maggie Gray's Oscar-nominated art direction." -- Grade: B+
Entertainment Weekly